Legit Reviews is going covert and has been granted access to something Classified from EVGA. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 video card has been touted as almost a GeForce GTX 580 at a much nicer price and EVGA throws an decent factory overclock on top of that. If you have the clearance to read this classified information see how much farther LR can push this card without extreme cooling.

We enjoyed the performance of EVGA's top end version of the GeForce GTX 570 and found pushing this overclock further was as simple as dragging a slider in EVGA Precision software and clicking apply. Achieving our significant overclock did require a bit more work to figure out the thermals but now that you have read this you know our trick if you can handle the noise. Better yet get this card under water and you can run at least 31% above reference clocks silently...

It's a shame EVGA tends to avoid building custom coolers (and when it does, like in the case of DS line cards, they seem to be very loud). I like the idea of a seriously pre-overclocked card built on an improved PCB but I also find having a well build cooling solution equally important. Would love to see EVGA do something in the lines of what ASUS and Sapphire do with their Vapor-X, Toxic and Direct CU II cards.

Good point and I agree it would be nice if EVGA made coolers of the quality you are talking about. I do want to make sure I was clear in the review that at 60% speed the fan is very quiet and has plenty of performance to cool the card at the factory overclock. It was only when I was trying to go for maximum overclock on air that I had to crank up the fan to loud levels.

From my perspective the GPU Cooler isn't a big deal and can easily be changed.

To me, the best part of this video card is the PCB design that EVGA used. They didn't use the standard GeForce GTX 570 PCB layout and instead took a GeForce GTX 580 PCB and slightly tweaked it for this video card. You get much better reliability with the GTX580 power design and for overclockers that is critical and something you can't change after the card is bought. The bones are good on this one! Some companies slap on great heat sinks on reference PCB's and others slap on reference coolers on custom PCB's... Which one is more important to you will determine what card you buy.

Hi Apoptosis! Where did you find people who were hitting "over 1025 MHz core"? You have a good sample that was able to hit 960/2099 @ 1.09v! Were games stable when you plated at those clocks? Other than AVP & 3D Mark 11, what other games did you test and for how long (on the OC 960/2099 settings)? Also, it would haven nice to see a reference 570 non-oc that compares to the classified on all the benchmarks. Great review btw!

I actually ran FurMark 1.9.1 for over 15 minutes at that OC and had no issues. I also did 5 AvP loops and I can tell you that when it was unstable I couldn't even get through one. I also did 3D Mark 11 at all three settings without problem for the review.

But because you asked I went ahead and fired up some BFBC 2 and playing right now on the test rig... so far so good but I'll let you know in a few hours how it goes. Fan is silly loud at 100% which is required on this card with the stock air cooler to run 960 but I wanted to validate your question.

As far as the 1025MHz I saw that over on Overclock.net and Xtremesystems.net and it was with water cooling. Here are the threads so you can check them out for yourself. Again, not sure on authenticity of some of these claims but just more wanted to see where our 960 ranked in the communities.

It was interesting to see 900Mhz+ clocks (even 1Ghz+) on those forum posts. Although it gave me shivers to think that they had to flash the bios and unlock the voltage cap to achieve such feat! I used to own PNY GTX570 Enthusiast edition on tri-sli (water cooled) and I hit 900Mhz easy on 1.1v. I sold those to my relative and got the EVGA GTX570 Classifieds soon after. I have the classifieds watercooled as well with my heatkiller X3 hole-edition water blocks using the X3 triple sli bridge. The cards are cooled with a 480mm + 360mm rad combined on my 600T case. Sounds good yah? The funny thing is i've been having some issues with my classifieds. The highest clock i've hit was 910/2250 @ 1.1v on Heaven 2.5 stable, which produced 79.1fps at 1920x1080 max settings. But when I fire up a game like BFBC2, there were some textures missing (probably my OC was too high?). Then I tried playing WoW for 25min. then my desktop reboots! Could some games fair well on overclocked gpus than others?

Perhaps I should switch back to reference or SC version of the GTX570 series? I liked the classifieds because they had the 6-phase PWM & added power that can be shoved in the card with the 8pin+6pin connectors, but it's a bit weird that even I have to push all three cards at 1.063v to run stable on factory OC settings (which works flawlessly). I've posted quite a few threads on the EVGA forums & even sent a message to tech support but i'm getting no solutions Maybe you know something I don't know when you were compiling this review. Just to give you an idea what my rig looks like:

I just can't be satisfied with the factory stock OC with the price I paid on these classifieds. I would be happy to hit at least 900Mhz core on them with the cooling I have (which never hits higher than 49* on 81* ambient temp). Plus, I want to squeeze as much performance as I can on my Nvidia surround

Well Quick, I have been playing for 2 1/2 hours at 960 with no real issues. 2560 x 1600 on my dell 30" and FRAPS telling me 41.8 FPS avg over a 60 second bench pull on a random map.

Now that I am deaf from the 100% fan I can go back to normal mode

Something is up if you can't hit 900MHz with a 1.1v which is what I am running for the 960MHz and further that you have to up the voltage to keep them stable at factory. It makes me almost wonder if something is up with that OCZ PSU. Crazy idea, maybe yank two of the cards out and let them just hang on your WC loop with no power and see if you can get one of them to OC to 960+. That might tell you it is either something with your MOBO or something with the PSU. I would say you might have a bad card, but 3 of them is no way. Maybe change the utility you are using to OC, did you use precision or something like Tweak GPU?

Also on those classified they have voltage reading points on the back, so maybe you should break out a multi-meter and see if the software is reporting correctly.

I guess my best advice would be to start with one and see what you can do with it to figure out if it is the card or something else in your system that is limiting your OC. You have more than enough cooling as the 480 and 360 should give you around 1700 watts of cooling and those 3 cards are only putting out about 750 watts OC'ed. A single 480 rad would probably be enough but why not .

Sweet rig btw, I just upgraded mine to an i7 2600k on a MSI z68 board that is running an EK Nickle HF on the CPU and looking to grab a Koolance or Heat Killer hole addition for the GTX570. I have an XSPC RX360 rad, and 120MM Feser rad (was a gift) in my loop. The rest is Corsair 850W PSU, 16GB Vengence memory, and a Corsair 700D case. I was thinking about grabbing a case labs case as my next upgrade but the way my desk it set up I am not sure it would fit. They are SWEAT water cooling cases. I had an EK block on my GTX470 but like most people the nickle plating started wearing off and the copper showing through.... not good.

Let me know how it goes, very curious why you are having so much trouble and it was cake for me.

So i've done as you asked to test each card and they do overclock at 920Mhz @ 1.1v stable (on benchmarks and games). Each one of the three passed this test but when I went ahead and enabled tri-sli they won't stick with those OC settings. My screens goes black and that's it! I had to reboot each time it does that so I can get back to windows. I haven't even touched the memory yet. My kill-a-watt says i'm consuming 900-935W full load when tri-sli is enabled and around ~535W per card when tested individually. I really don't know what's causing the problem. I've never encountered this before, even on my reference gtx570 which overclocked at 900 @ 1.1, i've never had this problem. I did test the max OC I can on tri-sli and it topped me out at 850Mhz @ 1.1 I find it interesting to find my uncle who owns three EVGA GTX580 3gb (also watercooled) which can go 1.125v max on MSI Afterburner. I mention this because the 570 Classified is based on the GTX580 pcb with the extra PWM right? I'm a bit sad that it locks me out at 1.1v I tried using EVGA LEET but it won't let me go any higher than 1.1v either, if I select a higher setting it would go down to 1.1v anyways.

I used driver cleaner last night which help a bit on my max OC. I also found this odd because the previous settings I had before was also the same series but it did work somewhat. I was thinking of trying the beta drivers 285.27 if they might work better and also double checking my OC settings on my EVGA SLI3 motherboard. I have my IOH voltage set at 1.20v -maybe 1.30v would be better? I will post my settings here tonight so you can take a look. I am eager to solve this mystery! BF3/MW3/Rage is around the corner!

I might change a few things with my radiator setup next month and add another 120mm rad on the back to replace my h70 then add my cpu in the loop somehow. The H70 isn't up to my expectations of cooling anymore since I have to get a high speed fan to get better temps. You have a sweet setup! The 2600K (i've read) can hit 5Ghz easy with good cooling. I did consider a DD double wide case at one point after my 600T but instead, i might design my own case as a project later this year. I just don't like the idea of hot air exhausting into the case, i would rather have the rads on a side profile but i've seen no enthusiast case do this well.

Bill, this was the conclusion I wrote on the EVGA thread that I started.

"So after rigorous testing on what could be wrong I’ve come into conclusion that these are having (whatever it’s called) SLi “bottleneck”. Each card worked (passed benchmark/gameplay) max overclock of 910/2250 1.1v. I believe my max overclock is ok since MJCRO hit 920/~2300 at 1.1v and of course there are others who can hit higher –legit reviews hit 960/2099 at 1.1v with no problems whatsoever (but this is only 1 card). Now my max overclock with 3 gpus on SLi is 870/2200 at 1.1v. I didn’t get any errors on games after prolong gameplay and benchmark tests at this oc. This will be the setting that I will use 24/7.

Perhaps there will be other people who will be running tri-sli on these cards later this year then I can compare my results. As for right now there aren’t any whom I know. Also, I reached a bottleneck after 870Mhz+ core. Once I hit 910Mhz @ 1.1v I only benefited 1frame per second vs 870Mhz core (910 was very unstable). Perhaps it was my cpu/motherboard/memory combination that was limiting my gpus and I know this won’t be a problem next year when Ivy Bridge comes out

I tried a few tricks to get around the 900Mhz wall like using driver sweeper (which worked a little bit). I also increased my IOH Vcore from 1.2 to 1.4 only to find out that it didn’t matter so I put it back to auto (1.1v) because I was getting 95*+ on my NB! Yes, 1.1v IOH Vcore worked just fine at 870/2200 @ 1.1v but I’m still getting low 80*+ (I’m thinking if I should cool my NB so I don’t fry it in the long run). I don’t know what else to try.

I find it interesting that although the gtx570 Classified is based on the gtx580 PCB with the added PWM and upgraded to 8pin + 6pin connectors, I (almost) expected that the max voltage threshold would be similar to the gtx580 right? My uncle has the 3gb gtx580 hydro coppers and he said his can go max 1.125v in Afterburner. Please EVGA let me hit 1.125v as well! Make the 570 Classified truly CLASSIFIED. "

That being said, I guess i'm content with 870/2200 @ 1.1v. The SLi degradation sucks! That's 40Mhz each core per card right there when its tri-sli

Last edited by Quicksilver on Fri Sep 23, 2011 2:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't know if LR got exclusive review rights for this board but I can't find another one online. That being said is the though right now that this is the best bang for the buck GPU wise? I come from an AMD/ATI background but am considering switching camps on my next build.

I don't know if LR got exclusive review rights for this board but I can't find another one online. That being said is the though right now that this is the best bang for the buck GPU wise? I come from an AMD/ATI background but am considering switching camps on my next build.

As Nate said, a lot if it is about price. If you are planning on overclocking the odds are this board will fair better than other GTX 570's due to some of the build choices such as the 6 phase power and 8+6 pin PCI-e power. If you are not planning to max out your overclock and possibly go under water then the standard issue GTX570 will probably suite your needs if you want something with most of the performance of a GTX 580 without the price point.

I personally run a GTX570 in my rig but I think you would be equally happy with a 6970 if you prefer red over green.

I cant clock above 865mhz and run 3D Mark vantage without my whole computer black screening and locking up, I tried adjusting the voltage to about 1.1 but no luck same result, im at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed and thoughts would be great